Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
The Complete Songs
Kitty Whately (mezzo soprano)
Nicholas Phan (tenor)
Anna Tilbrook (piano)
rec. 2023/24, Potton Hall, Blythburgh, UK
Texts included
Signum Classics SIGCD940 [2 CDs: 150]

Rebecca Clarke’s songs occupied her from 1903 until almost the very end of her life, 1976-77, when she revised Lethe, and whilst many have been recorded, this double-CD collection is the first complete edition of her songs containing, by my reckoning, 23 world première recordings or premières in these arrangements. This is particularly the case in her early settings of German texts, as the Anglo-German composer had embarked on a rigorous selection of poetry by the likes of Detlev von Liliencron – whom everyone seemed to be setting around 1905 – and especially the even more popular Richard Dehmel but these formative settings have been largely overlooked by recording companies until now. A word about the two discs’ organisation first. The songs are presented in an effective but not chronological run so that her main compositional periods from 1903 to 1912 and from 1919 to 1929 are contextualised. One principle has been to group texts by the same author, even if the compositional dates are divergent, so there are runs of Yeats and Blake settings as well as those by Dehmel, though this is not inevitably the case and, for instance, Dehmel’s settings can be heard scattered through both discs. I found this an apt solution.

Clarke embraced an attractive variety of approaches, from the traditional to the more exploratory. One of her most famous songs is The Seal Man, to a text by John Masefield, in this arrangement for voice, viola (Max Baillie) and piano. This passionate mini-scena is made the more evocative by virtue of the viola’s mordant commentaries and by Kitty Whately’s use of a light Scottish accent. She didn’t escape the lure of John Fletcher’s Sleep, set here for soprano, tenor (Nicholas Phan) and piano, though its overlapping lines mean there’s no comparison with Ivor Gurney’s setting.

The German texts are essentially ballad or folk-influenced settings, a number sung by the warm-voiced Phan. They may be post-Loewe (but pre-Wolf) stylistically, but they sport attractive piano accompaniments and fine vocal lines. Her setting of It was a Lover and his Lass avoids the hearty English-isms that usually accrues to it. She vests it, instead, with charm and wit. It’s the first of her Three Old English Songs and her settings of poems for just voice and violin, as here, and in the case of the Three Irish Country Songs, must have been influenced by Holst’s Four Songs, Op.35 for the same combination, published just a few years earlier, in 1920. She set Take, O Take Those Lips Away in 1929 and it’s sung by Phan and Roderick Williams accompanied by the piano – sweet and charming and unaffected.  However, she makes no attempt to infiltrate antique sonorities into John Dowland’s Weep You No More, Sad Fountains – no lute imitations, no fey affectations. Rather she treats it in ‘Georgian’ style, a vehicle for a contemporary conception. A decade later she allows a few Elizabethan hues to infiltrate Thomas Campion’s Come, Oh Come, My Life’s Delight but only enough as to be suggestive. 

Whilst The Seal Man and Cloths of Heaven may have been two of her most admired and often-performed songs at the time, her most striking and certainly longest setting was to come in 1941 in the form of Binnorie: A Ballad, a song discovered after her death, having never been performed. In this version for mezzo, viola and piano it lasts not far short of 14-minutes – strident, dissonant, utterly pent-up and far too long. A sign of her stylistically accelerated compositional journey between 1904 and 1920 can be heard in the remarkable A Psalm of David, When He Was in the Wilderness of Judah, a sternly unyielding setting five minutes long that shows the prevailing influence on her of Bloch – this was just after her Viola Sonata was narrowly defeated by Bloch’s Viola Suite at a famous competition – via Hebraic turns of phrase and a confident use of parlando at the end.  

She met the vogue for setting Chinese poetry in translation though one doesn’t feel that they engaged her sympathy and sometimes her settings are rather ordinary if not perfunctory – I find the very early Nacht für Nacht, for example, set formezzo (Whately) and soprano (Gweneth Ann Rand) weak. Yet the number of misses is very small, and the variety of her song-setting includes examples of her dry wit which can be savoured in settings such as The Aspidistra, with its terse humour. Some of the early settings, such as Oh, Dreaming World, are more geared to the Edwardian parlour whereas a certain quiet hymnal piety infuses others, such as Up-hill. All in all, she mastered a wide variety of songs and at a high level.

The previous disc of songs known to me is on Gamut GAM CD534 where Patricia Wright bore the vocal burden and Jonathan Rees played the violin in a few violin sweetmeats. Kathron Sturrock plays the piano. This fine disc was only somewhat blunted by a swimmy acoustic. This new one has no such limitations, is cast on a wider canvas, includes a variety of arrangements, and includes the whole body of Clarke’s songs.

The performers are top-flight interpreters of this kind of music. Kitty Whately bears the main responsibilities and her cultured mezzo is flexible and nuanced. Nicholas Phan’s elegant tenor is a pleasure to hear, and with Roderick Williams and Gweneth Ann Rand making little ‘guest’ appearances, there’s nothing at which to carp. I’ve omitted pianist Anna Tilbrook thus far but she plays throughout with total stylistic commitment, bringing out every nuance and colour required and is a vital element in the success of the disc. The musicians of the Seattle Chamber Music Society directed by James Ehnes even make a single appearance.

There are full texts and a ‘primary colour’ look to the booklet which has been nicely written and compiled. You don’t need me to tell you how much I enjoyed this disc and how highly I rate Rebecca Clarke’s body of songs.

Jonathan Woolf

Other review: John Quinn (November 2025)

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Other performers
Gweneth Ann Rand (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), Max Baillie (violin/viola), Musicians of the Seattle Chamber Music Society/James Ehnes (artistic director), Karen Gomyo and Erin Keefe (violins), Paul Neubauer (viola), Mark Kosower (cello)

Contents
CD 1
Greeting (1927)
Shy One (1912?)
A Dream (1926)
The Cloths of Heaven (1912?)
One That Is Ever Kind “The Folly of Being Comforted” (1911?)
Down by the Salley Gardens (Version for Violin) (1919 arr 1955)
June Twilight (1925)
The Seal Man (1922)
Oh, Dreaming World (1905)
Up-hill (1907?)
Sleep (1935)
Spirits (1909?)
Shiv, Who Poured the Harvest “Shiv and the Grasshopper” (1904)
Chanson (1904?)
Three Old English Songs (1924)
I. It was a Lover and his Lass
II. Phillis on the new made Hay
III. The Tailor and the Mouse
Vor der Türe schläft der Baum (1905?)
Du (1905?)
Oh Welt (1904?)
Nach einem Regen (1906?)
Vergissmeinnicht (1907)
Das Ideal (1907?)
The Cherry-Blossom Wand (1927)
The Donkey (1942)
The Aspidistra (1929)
Ah for the Red Spring Rose (1904)
God Made a Tree (1954)

CD 2
Binnorie: A Ballad (1941?)
Weep You No More, Sad Fountains (1912?)
Come, Oh Come, My Life’s Delight (1923)
A Psalm of David, When He Was in the Wilderness of Judah (1920)
Magna est veritas (1907)
Take, O Take Those Lips Away (1929)
Cradle Song (1929)
Infant Joy (1913?)
Tiger, Tiger (Revised Version) (1931)
Eight O’Clock (1927)
The Moving Finger Writes (1905?)
Lethe (1941)
Return of Spring (1910?)
Tears (1910)
The Color of Life (1909?)
Klage (1904?)
Manche Nacht (1907)
Aufblick (1904)
Durch die Nacht (1906)
Wandrers Nachtlied (1903?)
Stimme im Dunkeln (1904?)
Nacht für Nacht (1907)
Daybreak (1904)
Down by the Salley Gardens (Version for Piano) (1919)
Three Irish Country Songs (1926)
I. I know my love
II. I know where I’m goin’
III. As I was going to Ballynure
Away, Delights! (1912-13?)
Hymn to Pan (1912-13?)